Chapter 1

Aaron stood back a good ten feet from the intense, crackling fire and watched it burn. It was after two in the morning and it had taken him over an hour on a frigid moonlit night to construct a pyre in a clear-cut area of the mountain as far back up the abandoned logging road as he could drive the old Chevy S10 pickup. A plastic tarp over the rusty bed covered a dozen good-size oak logs, a chainsaw, a few pieces of scrap lumber for kindling, and a body. A cold, drenching rain and sleet during the afternoon insured there was no danger of starting a forest fire.

He’d used the computer in the school library to learn how it was done, and if he’d constructed the pyre correctly, in an hour or so there would be nothing left of his mom but a pile of ashes and some unpleasant memories.

He felt no grief for her death, only a vague disappointment in the futility of her life. How could he grieve for someone who’d been a pathetic empty shell of a woman for as long as he could remember?

And it’s not like her demise came as any big surprise. Joanne Hatter, thirty-four year-old single mother of three died three days earlier, presumably from acute alcohol poisoning ... well, you could probably toss in some complications like malnutrition stemming from her addiction to meth, weed, and opioids; anything to prevent her brain from emerging from its perpetual fog. And then there was whatever diseases she might have picked up from her collection of beaus who often dropped in for a quick and convenient fuck while the kids were at school. They were, for the most part, the idle, chronically unemployed souls who made a bare subsistence living cutting weeds in the summer and shoveling snow in the winter to support their booze and dope habits. Sometimes they’d leave a few bucks, usually not, but anyone was welcome who had some kind of mind-altering substance to share. Joanne never aspired to anything or anyone better, and her life could generally be described as a train wreck.

She knew how to get knocked up (she had three abortions before Medicaid footed the bill to get her tubes tied) and how to push out a baby, but she hadn’t a clue as to how to raise a child, nor did she have any real interest in it. In fact Aaron, the oldest who was not quite eighteen, had been the only functional parent to his sister, Lynn and his brother, Adam since he was seven or eight years old.

It was unlikely that even his mom could have told them with any certainty who their fathers were, and you didn’t have to look too closely at the three of them to see they were each the fruit of different loins. Aaron clearly had a black father, Lynn had flaming red hair, and Adam’s pale skin, black hair and freckles evoked images of an Irish leprechaun.

It was fortunate that the weather in southern West Virginia had been unusually cold and overcast for the past few days; cold enough that his mom’s body hidden under some old blankets in the shed hadn’t decayed to the point that it reeked, thereby alerting the neighbors that something had died. Of course dead dogs, cats and wildlife were fairly common in the hollow, so they might not have paid much attention anyway.

What was most important to Aaron was that the authorities didn’t find out his mom was dead because that would mean he and his sister and brother would be split up and sent to different foster homes or to an orphanage because there were no other relatives that they knew of. He didn’t intend for that to happen; not after all the effort he’d put into bringing them up and keeping them together. They had nothing and no one but each other, and that made for a tight bond.

The welfare checks would continue until his mom failed to check in with WVDHHR (West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources), and that might give him maybe six months or so to get Lynn and Adam through the rest of the school year. He knew the people down at Johnny’s Hardware and Grocery on the highway would cash the checks because they’d been doing it for years, and Aaron had long since mastered forging his mom’s signature.

He was due to graduate in May and that meant he’d have a lot better chance of competing for some kind of decent job to bring in enough income to keep them in groceries and clothing. He planned to apply at the WV Highway Department as soon as he was out of school. He fully intended to see his sister and brother through high school, even if it meant sacrificing any possibility of a college education for himself, something for which he’d held out some slim hope since he discovered early in life that he had a better than average brain. That slim hope was now even slimmer.

The thirty year-old trailer home they lived in wasn’t anything to brag about, but it was paid for and it kept the wind out. It once belonged to his grandad, a coal miner who died at the age of fifty-nine from a combination of black lung and rye whiskey. Aaron’s mom inherited it and the pickup by default because she was an only child and the only living relative. Her mother had long since fled the area for parts unknown in search of a better life.

Aaron drove the pickup to school at Mount View High School and usually got home about a half hour before Lynn and Adam. They didn’t know their mom was dead because he managed to get her out of the house before the school bus dropped them off. He found her on the couch with her cold, dead hands wrapped around a nearly empty bottle of cheap vodka.

When he thought about what would happen to them if he called the sheriff’s office, he decided to get rid of the body and tell his siblings that their mom was probably shacked up somewhere with one of her boyfriends. They wouldn’t need any convincing to buy that story. At some point later on, he’d tell them that she was probably gone for good, and good riddance because their lives would surely improve with her absence.

So he carried her wasted, emaciated body, stiff with rigor mortis to the shed and covered it with some old blankets, padlocked the door and began making plans to dispose of the corpse.

By the time he got the burn site cleaned up and got home from the unofficial cremation around four-thirty in the morning, it was too late to go to bed, so he sat up and drank coffee until it was time to wake up Lynn and Adam and get them ready for school. While they were getting washed up and dressed, he cooked a pot of oatmeal and tossed in a handful of raisins and some brown sugar. When they were fed and on the way out the door, he gave them two dollars each for the vending machines and sent them on their way. Their lunches were free, thank God and the county school system.

When Adam asked when their mom was coming back, Aaron patted his shoulder and said, “Who knows? Do you even care?”

Adam thought about it for a couple of seconds and answered, “Um, no, not really. I was just wonderin’.”

“Yeah, well if we’re lucky, maybe she’ll stay gone for a few more days.”

Once the kids were on the bus and on the way to school, Aaron looked around the trailer and came to the decision that things were going to improve now that the bane of their existence was gone. To start, he’d do a little cleaning before crashing for a few hours of much needed sleep. He was bone tired, physically and emotionally, and he knew he’d be useless in class, so he took the day off.

Once he got started cleaning, he couldn’t stop. The place was - and always had been - a filthy mess, but now that he was going to be the unchallenged head of the household, he had no intention of putting up with it any longer. They might be dirt-poor, but there was no reason they had to live like pigs in a sty. He spent hours washing dishes, pots and pans, scrubbing walls and floors, vacuuming the hallway and the bedrooms, scouring the bath, stripping the beds and washing every piece of cloth he could find in their trailer-sized washer/dryer combo. Even with all that, he knew it would take a while to get the stale smell of cigarettes and spilled beer and booze out of the place.

He finally crashed about two in the afternoon and woke up when he heard the TV come on about six. When he shuffled still fuzzy-brained down the hall to the living room, Lynn looked up from the couch and asked, “Did you clean this place up by yourself? Didn’t you even go to school?”

Aaron chuckled and said, “Me? Nah, it must’ve been gremlins or somethin’. I didn’t get to the grocery store today either, so it looks like we’re havin’ beans and hotdogs and leftover cornbread for supper. That okay with you guys?”

He got shrugs for an answer.

As he was cutting a few wieners into quarters and opening two cans of pinto beans, he asked, “You guys got homework?”

Lynn said, “Did it in study hall.”

Adam said, “I just got one chapter to read for American History.”

Aaron asked, “Well then how come you got your eyes glued to the damn TV? Get to it so I don’t have be naggin’ at ya all evenin’. Homework always comes first, and you know that.”

Adam put on a sneer and challenged, “You’re not the boss of me!”

Aaron put down the can of beans and walked over to stand between his brother and the TV. “How far do you wanna test that theory, bro?”

For a moment, the boy looked like he was going to argue, but he had zero chance of success and he knew it, so he just said, “Shit!” Twelve year-old Adam grabbed his history book off the coffee table and stomped down the hall to the room he shared with his older brother.

“Jeez,” Lynn sniped, “Going through puberty’s sure makin’ him a pain in the butt.”

“Yeah? Well you’re not always Miss sweetness and cooperation yourself sometimes. As I recall, when you were making your transition to adolescence three or four years ago, on a good day you were a major pain in the ass.”

She grinned sheepishly and mumbled, “Maybe.”

“And speakin’ of moody, aren’t you about ready to start your period? I ask because you always wait ‘til it’s already started before you remember you’re out of Tampons.”

Lynn laughed, “Jesus, Aaron, you must be about the only brother in the world who keeps track of his sister’s periods! There’s something weird about that, ya know.”

“Yeah? So tell me, smartass, how well does your mom do lookin’ after your female needs?”

“Ha! She can’t even remember what day of the week it is, so how’s she gonna remember my periods? But now that you bring it up, I think I do need some Tampons. Could you pick some up the next time you go to the store? You know the ones I like.”